First Thursday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
How to Wait
As I write this we have a big appointment for someone in my house tomorrow. It’s a medical appointment that we’ve been waiting on for more than a year and a half. There’s a lot riding on it, and there’s no way to know whether it will be helpful or unhelpful. In fact, with three medically complex people in my family we’ve had a lot of experience waiting for medical appointments and procedures, for test results and treatment options. And despite all that experience we’re still waiting for a diagnosis!
At our house we’ve had a lot of practice in waiting and - shock of shocks - we’ve discovered that waiting is hard! But we’ve also realized that waiting is a discipline. It’s a practice.
So. Do we know how to wait?
Maybe that seems like a silly question. Waiting is something we learn how to do when we’re a kid and mom tells us we have to wait until the cookies are cooled before we can try one. Waiting is counting down the days until our fiancé(e) arrives or our baby is born or our results from our exam come in the mail. We all wait, so what kind of a question is it to ask if we know how to wait?
Well, I actually think it’s a pretty reasonable one.
Because most people I know aren’t super comfortable with living in the unknowns of waiting. Most of us seem to struggle to find tools and strategies and practices to reach for when we are faced with the reality of waiting.
Yet it turns out that there’s an art to this waiting business that can actually be learned and practiced. And part of the point of this season of Advent, I think, is to encourage and invite us to practice the art of waiting so that those muscles are strong and capable for the waiting life will inevitably throw at us.
Each of our readings today remind us of practices that help us to wait well.
Paul tells us that waiting well will be an active, not a passive process. With the pride of a parent Paul describes the “work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 1:3, emphasis added) that the believers in Thessalonica are demonstrating. And this isn’t some random, time-filling type of work that he’s talking about either. This is about putting work into faith, labour into love and steadfastness into hope. So what does that look like?
We often think of faith as a mental belief but for my friends Tim and Rhonda, waiting for the fulfillment of their belief that people deserved to be housed only turned into something when they worked at it - putting everything they had in terms of time and money into it - for many years. In the process there was a lot of waiting. There were years of waiting for permits, money, and of course the actual building of the units. But after ten years my friends and their charity have created 49 new affordable housing units with many more ideas on the horizon.[1] Faith in their beliefs alone didn’t get them here. Work - even in the midst of the waiting - was required for things to change.
Love is spoken of as a feeling. As an emotion that is either on or off. But for my husband and I, love in the face of infant loss and multiple severe disabilities in our family, required a more robust love than just a feeling. We realized almost five years ago that if we wanted our marriage to continue in love, we were going to have to put a lot more labour into it than we’d been doing up until then. We started carving out lengthy amounts of time for one another. We started talking about the hard things that we hadn’t wanted to say over the years. We both went to therapy for a while to work on ourselves so that we could better show up for each other. In some ways we had to wait for our marriage to get better, but a lot of labour accompanied the waiting!
And what about steadfastness? It doesn’t really feel like an action word. It feels like an inanimate object that isn’t going anywhere one way or another. But have you ever held hard on the edge of a canoe you were trying to launch from a rocky shoreline on a choppy day? It’s work to hold on tight while the waves crash around you - work to not lose your grip when your hands get wet - work to steady it while other people transfer not-so-graciously into the boat. Steadfastness requires a sometimes-tenacious effort that allows you to hold on matter what - and in this case, Paul says the thing you must hold on to is hope. People want to hope for answers, but more than that, I think this is a hope for God’s presence - for Emmanuel - for God with us to be felt with us in the midst of the storm. This is the call of Hosea that we “press on to know the Lord” (Hos. 6:3). And whatever roots we need to tuck our feet under to help us stay steadfast in the face of the waiting is worth the effort, according to Paul.
This model of waiting - full of effort and labour and work - is anything but the passive concept of waiting we so often imagine when we hear this word. David tells us, though, that this active waiting will bring peace to us as God’s people. Indeed, that waiting like this will allow love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace to meet (See Psalm 85).
And for me, this isn’t just theoretical. In my experience there is peace to be found in the rootedness of steadfast hope that allows me to find myself in the presence of God in the face of even the most choppy and challenging of waves. When I surrender my fears to the labour of love, God has been faithful to God’s promises. And when my friends leaned into the work of faith, a vision of God’s righteousness that has created peace and shalom has begun to make a tangible difference to those experiencing homelessness in my community.
So as you take the first tentative steps into Advent this year, I invite you to think about how you have been waiting, and how you want to wait in the days and weeks to come. How you might reach out for the presence of God, hold tight to the faithfulness of God’s promise, or work towards the righteousness of God’s Kingdom come? Because we all get to choose how we wait.
Thank you for reading the New Leaf Advent Reader, a collection of reflections from writers across Canada. If you are enjoying the reader, sign up to receive the readings in your inbox each day here: SIGN UP
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One of the ways we have been connecting online since the pandemic pushed us online is through our Learning Centre, a weekly interactive Zoom call on a topic with a Canadian voice of wisdom. For the season of Advent, we will be featuring a few of our writers and making space to reflect together on the Advent Reader articles. Join us for the interactive sessions on Thursdays at 1:30 pm (Eastern time) or sign up and view the recordings of the sessions afterwards. SIGN UP for the Learning Centre Advent sessions.